Case Studies

We love to take on large, complex projects. Here are highlights from our work with clients who brought us fascinating problems and highly custom requirements.

Revolutionizing Thomas’s Publishing Network

“Happiest day of my life. Just don’t tell my wife :)” –Thomas

Thomas runs a large online publishing network. He initially contacted us for help optimizing the performance of a WordPress theme. We quickly solved that problem for him, and we also started to get a sense of his wider business needs, and of how our mix of business, process, and technical knowledge could help him meet those needs.

In a series of projects over a one-year span, we completely overhauled Thomas’s business. Some of these projects included:

An Ember.js and Laravel web app that revolutionized his monitoring and management of his site portfolio.

A robust WordPress site migration tool with a dead-simple interface, customized to do everything he needs and nothing he doesn’t.

Processes that used to take teams of people days or weeks can now be run in seconds, saving Thomas hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year alone.

The result: We simplified processes that used to take teams of people days or weeks into simple scripts and button-presses that can be run in a matter of seconds. And better yet, errors that were creeping in during all that manual work are now a non-issue.

Together, these tools have truly revolutionized his business, and have saved Thomas hundreds of thousands of dollars in the first year alone.

Helping Frank List Every Bird Species in the World

“It was a pleasure working with you. Not only did you communicate well with a near luddite (me) but also you really thought through the project and came up with clear, practical solutions.” –Frank

Frank is the author of the world’s leading ornithology textbook. He also runs the International Orthological Congress (IOC) World Bird List: a worldwide collaboration between scientists to list every bird species in the world.

The list itself is stored and worked on as a shared Google spreadsheet. To make it available publicly, the team was doing a painstaking process that involved copying-and-pasting and reformatting data to be able to publish it on the website. They were hurting for an elegant technical solution.

That’s where we came in: We built a custom WordPress plugin to allow for easy automatic publishing from the spreadsheet directly to the website. Leveraging Google’s APIs, our solution sends a quick query to the live spreadsheet whenever a given species list is viewed. Now Frank and his team are saved almost the entire “publishing” step that used to take them days or weeks to complete. Today, they’re able to publish a whole new iteration of their list in just a few minutes!

The result is that a great public resource can be maintained and shared among dozens of scientists—and published instantly to the web. That’s something to crow about.

Giving Claire E-Commerce on Her Own Terms

“So excited with the new site. In the first month, sales are double my previous best month ever!” –Claire

Claire is the owner of Hemp Beadery, which sells cord, beads, and other craft supplies. Her existing e-commerce site was limiting, and she was looking to move on. She needed a site that would be more modern, accommodate all her products, and work well on mobile devices.

We helped Claire pick the platform on which she’d be most comfortable: for her, it turned out to be WordPress and WooCommerce. We worked with Claire to customize her site to her liking, created a custom “Search by color” functionality that helps users easily traverse Claire’s hundreds of products, helped her streamline her logistics process, and help her transition the site without losing any of her hard-won search engine positioning.

Today, Claire’s site is attractive, mobile-optimized, and a growing money-maker. We’re pretty happy with that, but what’s most important is how happy Claire was to report it.

Optimizing Craig’s Online Sales Platform

“I signed up for a website tuneup and got a marketing makeover. Visitor conversion rates are up—a lot. Sales are up—a lot. I couldn’t be happier, and encourage anyone ‘on the fence’ to climb on board and prepare for a solid return on their investment in this dynamic team!” –Craig

Craig is the founder of HeadStart Publishing, an online publisher of expert guide e-books for home businesses. He wanted a “WordPress support person” to update and improve his many WordPress websites, each of which corresponds to one or more HeadStart guides.

In talking to Craig, we noticed some simple tweaks to his site portfolio that would create more engaging and dynamic calls-to-action across his portfolio. We rolled these calls-to-action into a custom-built plugin, enabling Craig to quickly deploy our changes across his portfolio with minimum effort and maintenance.

Designing and Building Our Meditation Start-Up

“I just wanted to let you know that this website is helping me crawl out of a dark place in my life. I sincerely appreciate your work on the website. I can’t thank you enough.” –Danny, Medivate user

Medivate is an online meditation-tracking and motivation platform. It’s a bit like RunKeeper or MyFitnessPal, but for meditation. We started it in early 2012 with a dream: It would be really cool if we could help people meditate more, and make a business of it.

What we did was built a comprehensive and novel platform in Medivate. From a technical standpoint, it’s an end-to-end custom PHP application with a variety of rich JavaScript actions, including a beautiful and well used online meditation timer.

Medivate users have logged almost a full year of active meditation minutes on the platform. And users are finding it quite valuable.

We’ve Helped Them—How Can We Help You?

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